Welcome to Part 3 of our Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to turn a website into an automated traffic generation machine using the WordPress CMS.
In Part 1 of this article series, we provided an overview of the process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to automating traffic to your website …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website, all you have to do is publish fresh content consistently to automatically attract new web traffic!)
In Part Two, we discussed the setup phase of the traffic automation process. We explained the best way to start if you don’t have a website yet, how to set things up if you already have a website, and what to do if your site was built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you where to set up a WordPress site on your domain)
In this section of the series, we will look at the configuration phase of the traffic automation process. You will learn how a WordPress site should be configured to automatically get web traffic as you begin publishing new content to your WordPress site.
WordPress Web Traffic Automation System – Configuration
Being able to attract more visitors to one’s website is often cited by many business owners as their greatest challenge online. Businesses are becoming increasingly more competitive and are researching any and every advantage they believe will get better results online.
Being able to generate traffic on demand can provide you with a tremendous advantage over the competition. For businesses, having an expertly configured website gives WordPress users a flying start from the moment their website is launched.
Configuration Is The Difference
There is a significant difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a site that has been professionally installed and set up by an expert website builder but not necessarily configured to take advantage of everything WordPress can offer you.
Here’s one way to understand the differences:
With a WordPress website that has been expertly configured you get a professional web presence with online business marketing automation!
(An expertly configured website gives you a web presence and an automated online business marketing tool!)
Not only are more steps needed to build and integrate an automated online business marketing process into your website, it also takes a special type of expert knowledge.
Let’s illustrate this with a joke.
A Semi-True Story …
Everything was going just fine in the widget factory when suddenly, things ground to a complete stop.
As no one could figure out what went wrong, the manager decided to call in an expert.
The expert arrived shortly after being summoned and went immediately to the control box. After staring at the board for no more than 5 minutes, the expert then took out a teeny-weeny little hammer and made a gentle tap about one inch from the top-right side of the box.
Immediately, everything inside the factory floor began working once again.
The manager was grateful and relieved as he thanked the expert, who left just as quickly as he had arrived.
A couple of days later, the manager received a request for payment of $5,000.
The factory manager picked up the phone and dialed the expert, demanding to know why they had been charged such a large amount of money for so little time spent delivering such minimal amount of work. He promptly requested an itemized invoice before hanging up.
The next day, an invoice arrived and was placed in the manager’s intray. Upon opening it, this is what he saw:
The main challenge most businesses face online is driving web traffic to their sites.
How much money did the factory stand to lose when the equipment ground to a halt and no one on the business had the expertise to get things up and running again? Did the expert in our story not have every right to demand fair compensation for having invested years building up the knowledge and expertise that allowed him to assess and fix a very costly problem?
Similarly, if you could have your website or blog configured so all you have to do is publish content to it and search engines, social sites and dozens of other web properties would be automatically notified, how much time and money would you save?
(How much better would your business be if you could automate the process of driving traffic to your website?)
Although the solution to many problems can seem quite simple once it’s been implemented, it rarely is that simple or easy when you are trying to work things out.
Knowing how to expertly configure a WordPress site is more than installing a website and configuring a few settings. It involves knowing where to tap! This includes knowing things like:
- Which programs you need to install to add certain functionalities to your site.
- Which services need to be set up to achieve certain results
- Which options need to be configured in order to ensure that processes will run as planned, etc.
(Driving new traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires expertise)
Although this part of the traffic automation system may not seem technically challenging, it can be quite complicated. It’s not as simple as installing a piece of software, tweaking some settings in your admin area or clicking on a button or two … it’s all of this and so much more.
Expertly configuring your website involves the integration of many parts such as your server, your site, and various third-party sites …
(The configuration stage involves more than just configuring a few WordPress settings)
If we were to create a simple diagram of the steps involved in the configuration process, it would look like this …
(A simplified diagram showing the configuration phase)
Let’s examine these steps in more detail.
Your Web Server
We’re not talking about the process of configuring your web-hosting account for website installation purposes (this is normally done during the Setup phase). We’re talking about configuring settings and options in your web hosting account that affect how you will handle web traffic …
(During the configuration stage, your web server settings need to be fine-tuned for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all web traffic is welcome traffic. Some of the traffic your business will attract will be unwanted traffic like bot spam, malicious threats, brute-force bot attacks, etc.
This stage of the configuration process, therefore, is all about planning for good and unwanted traffic and adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This includes looking at things like configuring server-level spam protection and securing server files, to configuring your domain and email redirections, setting up htaccess file redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your webhosting settings for handling things like email forwarding, page error redirects, etc?)
Once your server settings have been checked and configured (if required), the next step is to set up and configure various external sites and services.
3rd-Party Accounts Integration
The idea behind choosing external sites is that all content will be posted to a central location (your WordPress site) and from there, it will be distributed automatically to other components of your web traffic system, or notify traffic-related web properties and applications.
Once these external sites have been added to your system, content pointing back to your website gets automatically posted to these platforms. Your business receives exposure online, helping you tap into new sources of traffic.
Some third-party sites and solutions will need to have accounts set up before configuring your WordPress settings to save time and some will need to be done later, during the automation phase.
For example, here are just some of the accounts you will need to have set up before configuring your settings:
Google Webmasters
(Google Search Console – create a Google-friendly website or blog)
Google Search Console lets you notify Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for automatic page indexing, and provides you with a range of important information, SEO tools and diagnostic reports about your website.
After setting up your account, use this information to integrate and automate web traffic-related settings and notifications in WordPress using plugins like Yoast SEO and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your site’s performance, SEO, user engagement, marketing efforts, and more, by tracking all user behaviour, pages visited, keywords searched for, organic referrers, etc.
After setting up your account and site data, you can add traffic tracking code to all of your web pages in WordPress via a simple plugin and feed data automatically to various other useful applications.
Bing Data And Tools
(Bing Data And Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Webmasters. Once your account is with Bing are set up, you can use this information with traffic-related settings in WordPress using plugins like Yoast SEO (see further below) and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As explained in Part 2, WordPress offers the option of a hosted vs self-hosted website. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress platform if you plan to grow a professional web presence.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides a number of useful tools, which various WordPress plugins can access. We recommend setting up an account with WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll show you how to integrate this into your automated web traffic generation system in Part Four of this series.
Social Media Sites
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media sites and attract new visitors to your site)
You will need to set up your social accounts in order to configure these as part of your traffic generation system.
After setting up and configuring everything, you will be able to syndicate your content automatically to your social media pages and attract new traffic to your site.
Make sure you have set up accounts and profile pages with all of the well-known social networks – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc.
There are loads of social sites you can syndicate your content to. You don’t need to go crazy, just choose those that will work well with your setup and/or content sharing tools (we will cover some of these tools in more detail during the Automation phase).
(There are loads of social bookmarking sites you can post your content to. Image source ShareThis.com)
Additional Services, Aggregators, Etc.
There are many online technology platforms and RSS aggregators that can serve as secondary-level traffic generation sources. Some are free or provide free access levels, and some offer a range of pricing plans.
For example, here is a content aggregator site that lets you add a feed from your website …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse – Publishing platform for distributed content)
RebelMouse is a news aggregator for your RSS feeds and social profiles. Your content displays in a Pinterest-like format and visitors can follow your own RebelMouse website.
There are many different sites and platforms you can incorporate into your own traffic system. Please feel free to contact us if you would like to explore some of these further and discuss a strategy to suit your needs.
Once you have configured your web server and set up third-party site accounts, it’s time to configure your site’s settings.
WordPress – Configuring Your Website For Traffic
The first step in configuring your WordPress site for traffic is to ensure that your global settings have been correctly set up.
Let’s go over some of the important areas.
WordPress – Global Settings
By default, WordPress includes a Settings section that allows you to set up your site’s main settings …
(WordPress menu – Settings)
General Settings
Fields like Site Title and Tagline can influence your site’s SEO, search listings, etc …
(Settings Menu – General Settings)
Writing
The Writing Settings section contains a powerful and often overlooked traffic notification system …
(Settings Menu – Writing Settings Area)
As described below the Update Services section,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you have intentionally configured your settings to prevent search engines from indexing your site – see next section, then your site will automatically notify the services entered into the Update Services field
By default, only one service is available …
(Writing Settings – WordPress Update Services)
You can notify dozens of update services automatically with WordPress – just add a list of update services to this section …
(WordPress lets you notify dozens of update services automatically!)
Download A Comprehensive List Of Ping Services For Your WordPress Site!
Click the link below to download a comprehensive list of reliable and authoritative ping services for your WordPress site or blog:
Download A List Of Ping Services For Your WordPress Site
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Note: If you need help setting up the list of ping services on your site, we recommend using a professional web services provider. You can find professional WordPress service providers in our WordPress Services Directory.
Reading
This section affects how visitors will see your content when they visit your home page and blog pages.
The syndication settings on this page can influence traffic. For example, your choice of displaying the full content vs summaries of your post, affects how your content displays to users in RSS readers and blog post digests, and could impact someone’s decision to explore your content further, and whether or not they will visit your blog to get the rest of the content from a partial feed, or read the content in full without the need to click through to your site.
The main setting here as far as your traffic system is concerned is whether the Search Engine Visibility check box is ticked or not.
Normally, you want search engines to visit your site. Leaving the box unchecked allows your site to instantly ping your update services list whenever new posts are published (see Writing Settings above). Unless you have a specific reason why search engines should not visit your site, do not check this box …
(Global Settings – Reading Settings)
Discussion
Although the settings in this section are mostly concerned with how users engage with content on your site, you have the option to allow notifications to blogs linked to from your articles, and to allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks). This can work for you, but it can also drive bad traffic in the form of SPAM comments …
(Global Settings – Discussion Settings)
Permalink Settings
Permalinks allow you to create search engine-friendly URLs …
(WordPress Settings – Permalink Settings)
The examples below show some of the ways your post permalinks can be configured …
(Configuring SEO-friendly URLs)
If you need help setting up WordPress permalinks, see this step-by-step tutorial: Using Permalinks To Improve Your WordPress SEO
WordPress – Traffic Generation Plugins
The WordPress developer community makes available thousands of plugins that help to add almost every type of functionality imaginable to your website, including plugins with features that help to improve traffic generation.
Let’s take a brief look at examples of plugin categories and plugins that can help improve traffic generation
WordPress Security Plugins – Blog Defender
Once again, it’s important to configure your WordPress site for handling both good traffic and bad traffic. No matter what type of business you run or plan to run online and how small you think your web presence is, you cannot afford to ignore the importance of website security.
(WordPress Security Plugins stop bad traffic from harming your web presence)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your blog invisible to botnets and hackers.
More information:
WordPress SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
WordPress SEO plugins help drive more traffic by making your web pages easy for search engines like Google and Bing to find and index …
(Yoast SEO – WordPress Plugins For SEO)
A plugin like Yoast SEO can significantly improve your SEO. When properly configured, the Yoast SEO plugin not only makes your web pages easier for search engines to index, it also gives you control over how your content is displayed to Google’s search results and social media pages, e.g. Twitter, Facebook, and GooglePlus.
Social Plugins
Allowing visitors to share your content with their own friends and networks can help to increase traffic to your site, especially if your site provides great content that adds value to readers.
(You can easily add social features to your site using WordPress plugins)
WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their site using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins.
Many social share plugins let you specify which social sites visitors can share your content to, embed social buttons into your content, set up custom post messages, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of likes), etc. Some plugins even allow you to protect content or downloads which users can unlock by sharing your page.
Theme Settings
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that help grow your traffic.
For example, in addition to options and settings for configuring the layout and design of your website, many themes also give you built-in features that let you improve search optimization and site navigation structure for better indexing, add tracking, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many WordPress themes come with built-in traffic optimization features)
With a number of WordPress themes, adding social sharing buttons to your pages is as easy as clicking a button …
(Many WordPress themes provide built-in social sharing features that can be easily turned on with the click of a button)
Additional Sections To Configure
Last (but by no means least) in the web traffic system configuration process, are the things that need to be set up outside of the global settings.
This includes the following:
Website Legal Pages
Once again, when preparing your site for a growth in visitor numbers, it’s important to plan not only how to handle good and unwanted traffic but also for all the situations that can seriously affect your business as more and more people start finding and visiting your website.
If you engage in any form of commercial activity online, it’s important that your site is found to comply with regulatory agencies.
(Is Your Website Compliant?)
If you need help adding legal pages to WordPress, see this article:
Categories & Post Tags
WordPress tags and categories help improve traffic by allowing search engines to better classify and index your website.
(Post categories help search engines better organize and index your website, which helps to increase traffic.)
As we strongly recommend in this article, it’s best to review and set up your site’s tags and categories earlier on, during the Website Planning Stages.
In the configuration phase, you will want to review and make sure that the post tags and post categories that have been set up.
Visitor Site Map
A site map that displays all of your site’s posts and pages to visitors is not only a useful navigation tool, it can also help external applications find your web content …
(Site Map – great for visitors and beneficial for web traffic too!)
An HTML site map and an XML sitemap are different things. HTML site maps are web pages that provide readers with a visual map of how your content is organized, while XML sitemaps are mostly code that only search engines can understand. Although Google will index your pages just using an XML sitemap (which a plugin like Yoast SEO will create for you – see earlier section), making it easier for visitors to find more pages on your site results in increased traffic.
Your WordPress 404 Error Page
When visitors searching online for your website enter the wrong web address into their browser or click on a dead hyperlink, they are presented with a 404 Not Found page …
(Default WordPress 404 Error Page)
A 404 Error Page can be turned into a useful source of traffic to your functional pages …
(Configuring your 404 page allows you to recover traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 page can be set up in your web server, there are WordPress plugins that let you easily configure your 404 page inside your WordPress admin area.
WordPress Traffic Automation System: Configuration Phase – Summary
Once you have your WordPress site expertly configured and fully set up, all you then have to do to automatically start generating more traffic is add new content on a regular basis.
The process of expertly configuring a WordPress site, however, can be quite involved and elaborate and requires the configuration and integration of various elements and external web properties …
(Traffic System – Configuration Checklist)
The kind of knowledge and expertise involved in expertly configuring a WordPress site typically takes some web professionals a long time to learn.
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate the aspects of the process that can be automated. This step is explained in the next article in the series.
This is the end of Part 3
To read the rest of this article, click on the link below:
This article is part of a comprehensive series of articles aimed at helping website owners learn how to grow their business online using a WordPress-powered website and proven online marketing methods.
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"I have used the tutorials to teach all of my clients and it has probably never been so easy for everyone to learn WordPress ... Now I don't need to buy all these very expensive video courses that often don't deliver what they promise." - Stefan Wendt, Internet Marketing Success Group
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